Chapter 3. Installation System

The Debian Installer is the official installation system for Debian. It offers
a variety of installation methods. Which methods are available to install your
system depends on your architecture.

Images of the installer for wheezy can be found together with
the Installation Guide on the Debian
website.

The Installation Guide is also included on the first CD/DVD of the official
Debian CD/DVD sets, at:

/doc/install/manual/language/index.html

You may also want to check
the errata for
debian-installer for a list of known issues.

3.1. What's new in the installation system?

There has been a lot of development on the Debian Installer since its previous
official release with Debian 6.0,
resulting in both improved hardware support and
some exciting new features.

In these Release Notes we'll only list the major changes in the
installer. If you are interested in an overview of the detailed
changes since squeeze, please check the release announcements
for the wheezy beta and RC releases available from the Debian
Installer's news history.

3.1.1. Major changes

New ports

Support for the 'armhf' and 's390x' architectures has been added to the installer.

New languages

Thanks to the huge efforts of translators, Debian can now be installed in 74
languages, including English. This is three more languages than in squeeze.
Most languages are available in both the text-based installation
user interface and the graphical user interface, while some
are only available in the graphical user interface.

Languages added in this release include:

Welsh has been re-added to the graphical and
text-based installer (it had been removed in squeeze).

Tibetan and Uyghur have been added to the graphical installer.

The languages that can only be selected using the graphical installer as their
character sets cannot be presented in a non-graphical environment are: Amharic,
Bengali, Dzongkha, Gujarati, Hindi, Georgian, Kannada, Khmer, Malayalam,
Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Tibetan and Uyghur.

Network configuration

The installer now supports installation on IPv6-only networks.

It is now possible to install over a WPA-encrypted wireless network.

Default filesystem

ext4 is the default filesystem for new installations,
replacing ext3.

The btrfs filesystem is provided as a technology
preview.

3.1.2. Automated installation

Some changes mentioned in the previous section also imply changes in
the support in the installer for automated installation using preconfiguration
files. This means that if you have existing preconfiguration files that worked
with the squeeze installer, you cannot expect these to work with the new
installer without modification.

The Installation
Guide has an updated separate appendix with extensive documentation on using
preconfiguration.